Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
NADINE GORDIMERArt defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMER